Imrem: Will anything embarrass Reinsdorf like the Bulls?

Jerry Reinsdorf has sort of insulated himself from criticism, but the two teams he chairs make it hard not to pick on him these days.

Last week it was the Adam LaRoche nonsense swirling around the White Sox. This week it's the increasingly floundering Bulls.

The question today is whether Reinsdorf is appropriately embarrassed by his NBA team.

Not disappointed. Not frustrated. Full-blown embarrassed.

Everyone associated with the Bulls should feel like they were caught downtown with their pants down, like they misspelled s-p-e-l-l in a spelling bee, like they refused to pass a state budget.

The answer usually is no, Reinsdorf doesn't allow himself to be embarrassed. That's judging by the way he stays the course and stays with the people responsible for running the Bulls and Sox.

People like Bulls head coach Fred Hoiberg, who hasn't lost his team, as has been suggested, because he never found it.

Like executive vice president John Paxson and general manager Gar Forman, who keep failing to build a true championship contender.

Like Reinsdorf himself, who has become too much like the late Bill Wirtz was when he ran the Blackhawks.

Wirtz stubbornly kept moseying along, retaining Bob Pulford as his hockey honcho the way Reinsdorf retains Paxson and Forman and will retain Hoiberg.

Ah, but the Bulls must be testing Reinsdorf's patience right now as they play their way out of playoff contention.

Reinsdorf can't be OK with losing twice to the Knicks last week, then to Orlando on Saturday night with as much fight as a platoon of pacifists with popguns.

Thank goodness hardly any fans around here care about the Bulls anymore.

Otherwise they would be climbing up to the top of the highest steeple and screaming their lungs out in anguish.

And then maybe jumping off.

The Bulls are celebrating their 50th anniversary this season and that loss at Orlando might have been the worst ever.

The latest always is magnified, but that one game sure looked at least as bad as anything we saw in the Tim Floyd era, or any other Bulls era.

Wow, is that saying something, or what?

Teams lose. Bulls teams have lost a lot during the past half century. They have lost often and lost big and lost ugly.

But rarely have they lost as spiritlessly as they did against the Magic.

The Bulls came out dead, played dead and proceeded to get deader. If they played in a cemetery, the buried would have beaten the life out of them.

Reinsdorf expects, more than anything, that his teams play hard like Chicagoans work hard.

The Bulls instead looked like they were on a coffee break, followed by a smoke break, followed by a bathroom break.

Hoiberg says his team struggles with adversity ... He laments that players don't translate practice into games ... He wonders where the energy is.

Reinsdorf needs to remind his coach that it's his job to establish team toughness ... To make players play like they practice ... To inspire them to generate energy.

"The message isn't getting across," Hoiberg said at Orlando.

He seemed lost as he said it, out of answers, a hostage of his circumstances.

Look, losing isn't embarrassing, but losing like lambs leaving March is. Maybe it is even for the chairman, but probably not.

The Bulls need a complete makeover, but Jerry Reinsdorf rarely is an agent of change.

mimrem@dailyherald.com